Planetary boundaries

Engineering

Ecology

Biology

Boundary (topology)

Sustainability

Systems engineering

Computer science

Earth (classical element)

Geology

Business

Corporate governance

Oceanography

Physics

Mathematics

Astronomy

Earth system science

Mars Exploration Program

Environmental resource management

Sustainable development

Environmental science

Mathematical analysis

Astrobiology

Planetary exploration

Finance

The planetary boundary framework presents a ‘planetary dashboard’ of humanity’s globally aggregated performance on a set of environmental issues that endanger the Earth system’s capacity to support humanity. While this framework has been highly influential, a critical shortcoming for its application in sustainability governance is that it currently fails to represent how impacts related to one of the planetary boundaries affect the status of other planetary boundaries. Here, we surveyed and provisionally quantified interactions between the Earth system processes represented by the planetary boundaries and investigated their consequences for sustainability governance. We identified a dense network of interactions between the planetary boundaries. The resulting cascades and feedbacks predominantly amplify human impacts on the Earth system and thereby shrink the safe operating space for future human impacts on the Earth system. Our results show that an integrated understanding of Earth system dynamics is critical to navigating towards a sustainable future. The cascading effects and feedbacks of interactions between planetary boundaries shrink the safe operating space originally identified by analysing each boundary separately.

Human impacts on planetary boundaries amplified by Earth system interactions